In the drug-discovery screening field, biotechnology field and the like, various tests such as biochemical reaction test of a substance are conducted. In these tests, as a container for containing a chemical or a sample for culture and biochemical reaction, a microplate provided with a plurality of hole-shaped wells in a single plate is used. Also, since these tests are conducted systematically with a large number of specimens as a target, a large number of microplates are usually used for processing such as dispensing operation and componential analysis. The present invention relates to a handling device of various microplates for efficiently containing, taking out, and conveying to a targeted position the microplate in a processing device using the microplate for these tests such as an assay processing device and the like, for example.
The “assay processing” here refers to detection and quantification of those generated or consumed by mixing compositions required for a chemical reaction in a test tube and the like and having them reacted under a certain condition. Such assay processing was manually conducted for each sample at the initial stage but in order to process a large number of samples at a high speed, a high-speed processing device which automates the processing has been developed in recent years.
As a prior art of such a device handling microplates, a microplate processing device in which the microplates are individually contained in a storage shelf on which a plurality of microplates can be placed, taken out one by one by a ceiling-traveling robot-type plate conveying mechanism as necessary and transferred to a dispensing stage and the microplates after the dispensing operation are returned to the storage shelf is proposed (See Patent Document 1).
Also, since the art disclosed in Patent Document 1 has a problem that a lid of a microplate can not be efficiently attached/detached, another conveying art is proposed in order to solve the problem (See Patent Document 2). With the art in Patent Document 2, a conveyer type microplate conveying mechanism is used, and the microplate is placed on the conveyer for conveying. On an upstream side of the conveyer, a device for removing a lid is provided at a position higher than the conveyer, thereby the lid is removed. The microplate whose lid has been removed is fed to a predetermined dispensing position, the dispensing processing is carried out on the conveyer, after the dispensing processing is finished, the microplate is fed to further downstream and the lid having been fed previously is placed. After that, the microplate with lid is collected by a collecting portion.
Moreover, a feeding device for taking out the microplates with lid one by one from a containing portion for stacking a large number of microplates with lid for storage and conveying them is proposed (Patent Document 3). Patent Document 3 discloses a prior art in which after the microplates with lid are stacked and contained in a first stock portion, all the stacked and contained microplates are moved to a second stock portion provided below the first stock portion and after that, the stacked microplates are taken out one by one in order from the top.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-223636
Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-300200
Patent Document 3: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-249648